The project is planned to study the factors regulating the family's interaction with its social environment. The central hypothesis is that families develop shared views or constructs of every social community or environment with which they interact: these include neighborhoods, hospitals, schools and places of employment. The family's shared construction has a fundamental regulating influence over a wide variety of measurable interaction patterns that then develop between it and the social community. Using laboratory experimental interaction methods for measuring family interaction patterns, the present proposal studies four aspects of these shared constructions. First, using Problem Solving, figure Placement and Map Marking Procedures, it studies the relationship between these shared constructions and family interaction patterns. Second, using perceptual tests measuring cognitive controls, it studies the relationship between individual perceptual style of family members and the shared constructs of their families. Third, using psycholinguistic techniques, it studies the family's use of covert interpersonal codes to develop a shared construction of a novel social environment. And fourth, by comparing the family's performance in its home with that in the laboratory, it studies the effect of the social environment itself on the family's shared constructions.